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SPARK, Muriel and STANFORD, Derek.
An exceptional archive of 98 titles, primarily by Stanford, and his reference copies of other authors, annotated by him, many presented by their authors and INCLUDING these works, presented by MURIEL SPARK to Stanford :
TURGENEV, Ivan. Poems in Prose. Lindsay Drummond. London. 1945. pp. (vi), 66. Text woodcuts by DONIA NACHSEN. Very good copy in faded dust wrapper, one page tagged with an old air mail stamp and with a note in the margin by Stanford. *Inscribed - ' For D.S., Prose-Poet. M.S. 3.1.50'. READ, Herbert. The Green Child. Grey Walls Press. London. 1945. pp. 137, (iii). 4 coloured plates by FELIX KELLY. Without the dust wrapper, else a very good copy. Inscribed - 'To D.S. who wished for his own Green Child from M.S. who is a Green Child in her way. 31st. March 1953.' BROTHER LAWRENCE. The Practice of the Presence of God the Best Rule of a Holy Life Being Conversations and Letters of.... The Epworth Press (Frank H. Cumbers). London. No date. Authentic edition. 12mo. pp. 63, (i). Original pebbled cloth, a very good copy. *Inscribed - 'To Derek with love. M. 17.6.56' NOTABLE ITEMS INCLUDE: DEREK STANFORD : OPUS [Creative Politics], no.11, Summer 1942. THE WINDOW [review of Heath-Stubbs A Charm Against the Tooth-Ache], no.8, February 1955. GRUNDTVIG REVIEW AND ALMANAC, Eagle Creek, Oregon. A reprint from number one : Background to English Poetry: an essay on the outlook of two decades. Mimeographed and stapled. MEUM STEWART AND CLIFFORD BAX - folded 4pp. leaflet with Christmas Greetings, containing a fragment of 'Who's Who in Heaven', a sketch by Clifford Bax. 1953. T. S. ELIOT. Ezra Pound Selected Poems Edited with an Introduction. Faber and Faber. 1934 reprint. Annotated by Stanford, with 55 lines of ms. verse by him on separate pieces of paper pasted to the rear end-papers. A full list of the other items available on request.

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*See SIMON JENNER's Obit in the Guardian, 2009 - 'The poet and critic Derek Stanford, who has died aged 90, had reasons to be grateful to the novelist Muriel Spark, his one-time lover, but her characterisation of him as the fifth-rate, pushy writer Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) was not among them. Nor were her pronouncements on his 1963 work, Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study. "If Mr Stanford had applied to me," she wrote, "I would have advised against this undertaking." But, 50 years after they parted, his poems seemingly inspired by the affair appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for several years, conjuring up too the doomed 1890s poets he identified with and championed................. Spark entered Stanford's life in the late 1940s when he asked for work at the Poetry Society, where she was secretary and ran the Poetry Review. When she was ousted soon afterwards, he organised a protest reading, and then petitioned T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene for money on her behalf when she collapsed after using the appetite suppressant Dexedrine. Spark's autobiography Curriculum Vitae (1992) later claimed that her literary success made Stanford ill, but then, his success on her behalf made her well.' See DOROTHY MCMILLAN Scottish Poetry Library - 'Between leaving the Poetry Society in 1948 and the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1951, Muriel Spark had an affair with the poet Derek Stanford, with whom she collaborated on books on Wordsworth and Emily Brontë (when Stanford later sold her letters and wrote about her life, he became her lifelong enemy, lampooned in A Far Cry from Kensington, 1981, as a pisseur de copie), wrote a biography of John Masefield, published The Fanfarlo and Other Verse, joined the Anglican Church, converted to Catholicism, dieted wildly, using dexedrine, and had a breakdown. None of these experiences was wasted but her writing resists explanation simply in terms of her experiences.'